HIMSS EMR Selection Toolkit – $149 for What?

One day when browsing through some different EMR related websites I ran across HIMSS’s EMR Selection Toolkit. I was of course intrigued by the title since I’d heard so many good things about HIMSS and the conference that they hold. Granted it is a conference and prone to have faults, but overall I’d heard good reviews about it. I also have to thank that conference for introducing me to SensibleVision and biometric facial recognition. They are fantastic!

The EMR Selection toolkit offered the following:

The HIMSS Ambulatory EHR Selector can help you make a well-informed choice. The Selector is an on-line database of EHR products and vendors, comparing more than 375 important characteristics, including:

-Practice size
-Specialties using the product
-Software pricing
-Contract details

-Product features and functions
-Regulatory compliance
-Training and support

The HIMSS Ambulatory EHR Selector is offered to individual physician practices for an annual subscription fee of $149.

I thought that might be a nice offer until I looked on the right side of the screen. It said it had 34 available products to search. Today when writing this post I went back and now they only have 31 products to choose from. I’m not sure how this works, but I’m amazed that a group like HIMMS can only profile 31 EMR products. That is absolutely crazy. I will admit that they do have a number of good choices, but 31 seems so narrow considering all the great EMR systems out there.

Sounds like an interesting business model for me. I’ll review the characteristics of 31 EMR systems and then charge you $100 to search my review. I’d be saving doctors $49. I might just have to do that. On second thought, what if I review 31 systems and then let you decide what the information I give is worth. I’m pretty sure most doctors have $149 in their budget to save them from being stuck with the jabba the hut EMR’s of the world.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • This is the most interesting medical record resource
    for MD’s thinking about getting an EMR that I have seen
    in several years.

    Kent Willard’s Ectopic Brain has been the previous best,
    but directed at Palm based stuff…

    I hope you are making money with both ads and contributions. I have been to HIMSS several times
    and you have seized on the key problem with them.

    They want all your money up front. They are the
    BIG IT players and are not at all MD centric. They
    are Hospital IT centric with their eyes on the CEO
    CFO or whoever has purchase authority.

    All the MDs that I know that have fully functional
    EMR’s of different sorts have all made them themselves
    from Filemaker or Windows templates or some other
    form of available software. One doc has eMDs and
    he is a new youngster and another relatively young
    Pain doc has recently bought eClinicalWorks after
    using the same billing software that I have been using for 10 years. Compumedic from DataStrategies. It
    has worked well for Medicare submission, but is tied
    to Access database and now moving to SQL the MS
    version.

    Keep up the good work. If you know anyone who
    has implemented the OpenVista system in their
    office I would like to speak to them..

    cbMD
    la jolla california

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